Jimmy Stephens tackles a worldview where comprehensive knowledge is had amongst an infinite amount of minds.
TheQuestioner:
Yeah, the I mean the former of replacing an omniscient mind with the idea of a societal distribution of comprehensive knowledge. Essentially, in this case, each proposition is known.
Jimmy Stephens:
1.) It would be a fallacy of division to suppose that because all propositions belong to the whole of human society that each individual inherits the comprehensive set. In fact, that sounds like a good skeptical scenario: one where humanity might, as a sort of hive mind, know things, but no human individual does because it lacks the comprehensive perspective of the hive. 2.) It is not only bizarre but untenable to suppose that all propositions can be known by a spatiotemporal thinker. There are many propositions beyond the time and space of present humanity to conceive, much less consider, much less believe in with justification. And that is only to consider time and space; there are other conceptual dimensions to this. 3.) A cousin to objection (2) is that human beings lack the kind of cognition necessary to contain all propositions. It follows intuitively that if one human mind lacks the right constitution, nothing about amassing more minds of the same nature helps the situation. Why, though, is such “containment” out of the question for our cognition? One reason is that we do not have the introspective attention span. Together with the fact that we think propositionally by linking chains of propositions together in sequitar relations, human consciousness is incapable of thinking about more than a few propositions at once, leaving space for misremembering or misrepresenting the structure of propositions, or worse, just confusing what the proposition constitutes. Even if you had an infinite set of human minds working together, this problem is linked to our finitude, not to our lack of brains.
4.) Similar to (1), societal knowledge could be closed off from the individual intentionally. That is, whatever societal consciousness (of all propositions) is, it could be that society functions by or prefers not to let the individual in on their set of propositions. This is akin to a theism where god is bent on withholding information from his creatures.
5.) And this is probably the most damning of all. On the view that one human mind, all human minds, some human minds, or the composite of human minds have access to the set of all true propositions, the concept of learning new information is incoherent. Scientific progress, historical findings, and the like, become nonsense programs comparable to playing tic-tac-toe without game rules. The individual cannot add new information to society because society would already possess the whole of information itself. Thus, human history becomes not a progression of knowledge gleaning, but a giant language game where the old is rehashed in insignificant games.
Put simply, to learn propositional content presupposes that it was not had beforehand. Otherwise, we find ourselves knee-deep in a Platonist type view.
The Council 
One thought on “Hive Mind”